Major flaws when operating on computers by Apple using Intel processors.

Aspyr released a beta of a patch to fix the problems in 2007, but the patch was never finalized and many bugs remain. Some have a serious impact on playability, including frequent crashes if a city exceeds 95,000 population, flawed display of the water surface, frequent blurring or replacement of objects with random other objects, and an inability to significantly accelerate the vehicle in driving mode that prevents many gameplay features from being unlocked.

OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) can render the game completely unplayable, even with the 2007 patch. Running the Windows version in Wine or a Virtual Machine generally gives a more convenient and reliable result.

An integer overflow bug is also present in the game. Under certain conditions, the Junior Sports Program and Parks and Recreation expense items will be a negative value - thus adding to the end of month balance instead of reducing it.

Copy down what is listed as the "Device ID" as well as the card's name.

The "Device ID" is a number that identifies your card, as well as who makes it.

For example, if 10DE-1086 is the Device ID, 0x10DE identifies the card's vendor, and 0x1086 identifies your card.

Locate your SimCity 4 installation.

Within the root folder, open "Graphics Rules.sgr" with the text editor of your choice.

Locate the line partialRule "Fast card" -any within the file

Add your own card's name in the list, separating the vendor and the card with asterisks.

For example, stringMatch cardIdentity "ATI*HD 4800 Series*"

Save and close the file.

In the same folder, open "Video Cards.sgr" with the text editor of your choice.

Locate the header featuring your card's vendor (and vendor ID).

Add your card in under the header, preferably in numerical order.

For example, card 0x1086 "Nvidia GeForce GTX 560"

Don't forget to preface your card ID with the "0x"

Save and close the file.

Open SimCity 4.

Enter the video options menu.

Check "Hardware" under the "Rendering" header.

This may fix your problems in-game. If not, try messing with some of the graphics options in-game. If none of these options work, you may have to resort to using Software rendering, in order to achieve a playable experience.

SimCity 4 may crash on startup while reporting an error that claims that SimCity 4 was unable to initialize the graphics card, this may occur when using a hardware-accelerated rendering mode and a non-standard resolution. Changing the rendering mode to "software" or changing the resolution to one of the supported resolutions (800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200) should resolve this issue.

Open the file GraphicsRules.sgr in the game's root folder in any text editor.

Search for the line stringMatch cardIdentity "*7?00*"

Modify the line so it reads stringMatch cardIdentity "*Radeon 7?00*"

This will stop your modern card from triggering a compatibility check designed for the original Radeon 7000 series, forcing settings that make the game perform badly.

Alternatively, this can be resolved by installing the SC4Launcher Utility. Once installed, run the launcher and navigate to the 'Hardware & Audio' tab. Enable the option 'Force Draw on Scroll' by checking the tick box. This should resolve the issue completely and will remain fixed regardless of whether the game is started with this custom launcher or through running the normal SimCity 4 executable.

If two or more copies of the same city exist in the Region folder upon starting SimCity 4, the game uses only one version and the other city copies are either deleted or automatically moved to the Downloads folder.

SimCity 4 determines which file to use by sorting the city file names alphabetically and taking the first entry.

If you have copies of cities in your region folder, e.g. "City - TEST 1.sc4" "City - TEST 2.sc4", then only "City - TEST 1.sc4" will be kept, and "City - TEST 2.sc4"either get deleted or will be moved to the Downloads folder

The game also recognises Czech, Hebrew, Greek and Russian, however no official translations were ever released and no community translations have been made, possibly due to lack of compatible font sets.